Equality of Opportunity Over Equality of Outcome

02/24/2013

Christina Hoff Sommers, for example, claims that in the US women have achieved ‘equality of opportunity’ and that anything further is an attempt to rig up some sort of ‘equality of outcome’. She focuses quite a bit on educational opportunities, gender quotas, female centered programs and the like, saying that because men and women are different and make different choices so much effort is an attempt to encourage women into fields they may not be interested in.

I’m not even going to bother arguing that topic, but what I will say is this: When it comes to the ability to earn an income women can never be considered to have achieved ‘equality of opportunity’ in a country where prostitution is in any way criminalized. CHS and her ‘gender feminist’ counterparts can argue all they want about the importance of ‘equal gender representation’ on academic panels, and on those panels they can argue all they want about how much women earn in comparison to men and how that effects that status of women, but until they recognize that the criminalization of either the buying or selling of sexual services is inherently discriminatory against women they just sound like a bunch of self-interested privileged hypocrites to me.